SilverBridge Awesome Projects 2018 comes to a close

Now in its third year, SilverBridge recently concluded its 2018 Awesome Projects campaign designed to reward innovative thinking by its employees.

“The previous two competitions laid a strong foundation to take the campaign to the next level. With employees getting comfortable with the process and rules for judging in 2017, we were able to focus on solutions and even more innovative ideas this time round,” says Claudette Steynberg, Product Manager at SilverBridge.

Due to the pressurised work environment, employees do not have the freedom (and luxury of time) to experiment with different ways of solving customer challenges. Awesome Projects changes this and enables SilverBridge to give its developers and other employees a platform to come up with innovative out-of-the-box solutions to important business problems.

The winning idea in 2016 was used to speed up internal implementation processes while last year’s [winner] was a standalone solution that has already been demonstrated to customers following a few minor refinements. Even the second prize winner of 2017 has been implemented at several customers illustrating the merits and effectiveness of Awesome Projects.

“Beyond these solutions, Awesome Projects familiarises our employees to work across departments more effectively than before. This campaign highlights the importance of marketing, developers, admin, and so on to join forces and come up with integrated ways of solving not only customer problems but often industry ones as well,” says Steynberg.

As Awesome Projects is a continuously evolving initiative, SilverBridge introduced a few minor tweaks to the process this year and added another level of prize in addition to the top three. This takes the form of a participation prize awarded by way of a lucky draw (to those entrants meeting certain criteria). This will see two lucky contestants being sent to Las Vegas to attend the Microsoft Inspire partner conference taking place in July this year.

This year’s judging panel included a mix of external SilverBridge customers as well as executives Stuart Blyth, who originally started the competition, and Lee Kuyper, Group COO of SilverBridge Holdings.

The winners for 2018 are:

SilverBridge category:

1st prize:

HelpMe – by Leonel da Silva

This email-based solution provides SilverBridge employees with the following:

A single gateway to multiple systems across the business;

Selected company templates and information emailed to the user;

Dynamic SQL reports emailed to the user on request; and

A space in which each department within SilverBridge can customise and make their own.

Customer category:

1st prize:

SmartGrid – by Tsundzukani Mhlongo

An intelligent grid that dynamically determines where to go and what to open when double-clicking on a specific validation error in Exergy.